There Are No Ceasefires on Stolen Land

Liberation, not Liberal Zionism

Tithi Bhattacharya

October 17, 2025

doi.org/10.63478/LCGS3WPT

Social media is filling up with images of what can only be called joyous determination—images of Gazans returning to their devastated city and rebuilding, reconstructing, renewing. I cannot stop watching videos of children hugging their cats, of women and men laying bricks on a bombed-out home, of twins reuniting. All this amidst what the IOF called “finishing touches” to their two-year holocaust: as they were forced to retreat from Gaza, they set fire to food, homes, and a critical water treatment plant in their own version of “festival of the oppressor.”

The current ceasefire includes consistent bad faith deals from the usual suspects. The Israeli list of Palestinians to be released as part of the hostage exchange has carefully left out the names of several popular leaders whose release Hamas has insisted upon. Among them are Marwan Barghouti (popular leader, often called the Palestinian Mandela), Ahmad Saadat (Secretary-General of the Marxist group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), Hassan Salameh (Qassam Brigade member with forty-eight life sentences, the third highest among all Palestinian prisoners), and Abbas al-Sayyed (senior Hamas Leader).

The two sides at the negotiating table seem to have been negotiating for completely different realities, with Hamas asking for a permanent ceasefire guaranteed by the United States and Israel asking for a “demilitarized Gaza” with Hamas completely dismantled. In his televised address to the nation, Benjamin Netanyahu declared that “If this [dismantling of Hamas] is achieved the easy way—so be it. If not—it will be achieved the hard way.”¹ The United States of course has refused to comment on any of this—perhaps the President is waiting for Jared Kushner’s riviera plan with Leo DiCaprio’s hotel chain?

In these circumstances every Palestinian—and everyone serious about winning freedom for Palestine— knows that the ceasefire is simply a respite, and an unstable one at that. After all, the IOF still controls 53 percent of Gaza. Even if the active genocide moves away from the headlines (undoubtedly to the relief of mainstream Western media), all of us know that the everyday violence will continue in Gaza and the West Bank. Ceasefire or no ceasefire, settlers and the IOF will continue to harass, violate, and kill Palestinians. Under these circumstances, nothing is more urgent than an assessment of the ceasefire and a collective discussion of future strategies for the international Palestine movement. It is the movement, of course, that has brought us to this point.

What Ceasefire on Stolen Land Looks Like

While is true that the Zionist project continues, the current respite has won some short-term victories:

Israel has been reduced to a global pariah.
None of the Palestinian leadership has been exiled.
The Blair Witch Project—Mouin Rabbani’s brilliant term for former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s prospective leading role in Gaza’s interim authority—seems to have been put on hold.²
Some aid is trickling in.
Most importantly, Palestinians are finally returning to their homes in a city where caring for the living can never be paused, even for a moment, to mourn the dead.

While the wins may seem momentous after two years of publicly broadcast genocide, the alarming aspects of this ceasefire deal are also becoming more evident:

Israel has yet to be held accountable for their internationally recognized war crimes.
No major Western power has cut financial ties with Israel or imposed sanctions.
The plans for an archipelago of “Bantustans” in Palestine have not been withdrawn. Nor have the grotesque plans for Gaza as a beach resort.
Despite the two-year long holocaust, a full 76 percent of US Jews still view Israel’s existence “as vital for the future of the Jewish people” (though many of those remain critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza).³ The idea that Zionism and settler colonialism are the only solutions to (very real) European antisemitism continues to thrive.

Once the deal is weighed thus, it becomes clear that there can never be any permanent ceasefire on stolen land. For the movement, then, “right of return” and “land back” remain our goals.

Moving from Respite to Liberation

Let me clarify at the outset the social movements that I think brought us this small respite: the global spread of large internationalist marches, the campus revolts, the flotillas, the magnificent general strike in Italy, and the less spectacular but equally significant labor actions on campuses and other workplaces.⁴ And, finally and most importantly, Palestinian actions against the Occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. These actions, taken together, are what constitute “the movement” at this current moment. This movement, in all its component parts, needs to be strengthened and spread in order to move from respite to liberation.

If we on the left take this task of amplifying our reach seriously, there are bound to be debates about the fine print, which strategies are best, with whom we should be collaborating, how we deal with state repression, and so on. Comradely debate is the hallmark of a healthy left and since October 7, we have seen some truly generative discussions in the movement about the role of violence, the meaning of decolonization and sovereignty, and the relationship between capitalism and colonialism. I believe that Jacobin has published Eric Blanc’s interview with Hoda Mitwally and Bashir Abu-Maneh in this spirit: as a contribution to a discussion about strategy.⁵ It is a long piece, and I encourage everyone to read it. But here I want to challenge a few of their contentions with a different perspective.

I am confident one can argue that US funds should go to healthcare and not Israel at a union meeting…without linking arms with Brad Lander or Adam Schiff. AOC will always be welcome in our encampments, marches, and pack-the-courts actions. But in order to extend that welcome we need not use a public forum to apologize for her embarrassing defenses of the Iron Dome.

The first assumption of the piece is that the movement in the United States has “failed to consistently build the biggest and broadest coalition possible.”

The second assumption is that the narrowness of the movement is attributable to the ultraleft politics of its leadership. The two examples they cite are:

(a) that the campus “encampments’ rhetoric was often kind of inflammatory (and prone to misinterpretation), which undercut efforts to involve and persuade others to join the fight for a ceasefire and divestment”;

(b) that some Palestinian groups, which they acknowledge “have led some of the bigger protests,” are essentially “middle-class activists” who insist on excluding even liberal Zionists from the movement. This, the authors reason, is because these activists do not understand class politics. It is for such misguided reasons that these ostensibly ultraleft activists have harsh criticisms of DSA representatives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who supports the Iron Dome) and Jamal Bowman (who refuses to abide by the DSA’s own resolution on BDS); and finally,

(c) that the correct way to broaden the movement is to “get our hands dirty” and commit to “united-front, inside-outside efforts to win a permanent ceasefire.” Instead, the authors complain that the “US activist left” has incorrectly made the Iron Dome into a make-or-break symbol,” and they “have a preexisting ideological orientation toward trying to break the Left from the Democrats immediately or in the very near future.”⁶

The two dangerous fantasies that these arguments enclose, and from which their logic flows, are as follows:

(i) that middle class student-activist types rather than real working-class people are leading this movement; and

(ii) that only struggles at the point of production constitute “class struggle,” and transformative change can only come through those.

I think these comrades and I have been reading our Marx, not to mention our daily newspapers, rather differently. Three regimes in South Asia, the region I come from and study, have been overturned in the last year by student-led movements!⁷ Ought we to be condemning the young people of Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh for being insufficiently Marxist?

Sarcasm aside, between October 7, 2023 and March 2024, over a million people joined these marches for Palestine in the United States. Are the comrades so assured that there was no class orientation to them? That these marches and die-ins were effective is now undeniable. A March Gallup Poll shows that public opinion on Israeli action in Gaza changed from majority approval (November 2023) to majority disapproval (March 2024).⁸

Similarly, over 3200 people were arrested during the student encampment wave.⁹ Students, faculty, and staff were beaten, fired, expelled, and deported. The administration turned campuses into a warzone against unarmed, peaceful students exercising their constitutional right to protest. There were snipers on our roofs and armed guards controlling where we could go. I know first-hand that many nonunionized staff, adjunct faculty, and even workers from some campus bookshops came out in full-throated support for the students and formed cordons to protect them from the police. Another critical aspect of the encampment movement, perhaps its most important, was that it had the full support of the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), which declared that the encampments “brought to international attention like never before the complicity of their academic institutions in Israel’s genocide and apartheid.”¹⁰

I would unhesitatingly call this class struggle. Wouldn’t you?

Needless to say, I am in complete agreement with the authors that only workers under capitalism have the kind of power we need to shut the system down. See Italy. But modern history has shown us again and again that there is no unilinear logic to class action. That is, class action does not always begin in the workplace and spread outwards. While a strike can initiate the fall of a regime, such a strike can be catalyzed by a group of absurdly brave civilians, in little dinghy boats, armed only with baby food and rice, set to confront an empire. Again, see Italy.¹¹

Demonstrators during October 3 general strike in Italy. Source:USB/ Facebook — Demonstrators during October 3 general strike in Italy.
Source:USB/ Facebook

I also agree with the authors that this is a critical moment for the Palestine movement in the United States. The next few months will determine whether we continue on the old route of appeasing liberal Zionism and “collaborating” with such elected Democratic Party officials on their own terrain of electoral politics, the consequences of which lie in the ruins of the left around us. Or if we will take our lead from Palestine, from the flotilla, and yes, from the young activists—working class, immigrant, and student—and continue to build our movement away from the contagion that is liberal Zionism. I am confident one can argue that US funds should go to healthcare and not Israel at a union meeting (as the authors rightly argue we should) without linking arms with Brad Lander or Adam Schiff. AOC will always be welcome in our encampments, marches, and pack-the-courts actions. But in order to extend that welcome we need not use a public forum to apologize for her embarrassing defenses of the Iron Dome.¹²

Trump’s ceasefire deal is his way of restabilizing US relations with Gulf capitalism and making nice with Qatar, angered by the reckless Israeli airstrike on September 9. He wants a relaunch of his 2020 Abraham accords for the sake of his declining empire and to ensure that Gulf money flows into his planned beach project in Gaza.¹³

It is striking that the Palestinian hostages are loaded onto buses from Israel to reach their families in historic Palestine. Buses, not airplanes or boats, indicate the short distance between these factories of torture and home. That road is now paved with the bodies of more than sixty-seven thousand Palestinians, of whom at least twenty thousand are children.¹⁴

For those of us not in Palestine, the ceasefire is merely a window to rebuild our forces and renew our efforts to help restore to historic Palestine her unbowed people, her rich olive groves, and her poets who sing of freedom.

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There Are No Ceasefires on Stolen Land

Liberation, not Liberal Zionism

Tithi Bhattacharya

What Ceasefire on Stolen Land Looks Like

Moving from Respite to Liberation

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Class Revenge Fanfiction

Rethinking the Syrian Revolution

The Anti-Zionist Tradition of the US Jewish Left

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